Italian/Passato prossimo

In Italian, passato prossimo is a very common tense expressing a recent, concluded action. To have an idea, you can use passato prossimo for an action you have just done, let's say from five minutes ago to two or three days ago. Despite this rule (which is not as strict as you can imagine), in northern Italy passato prossimo is also used to refer to actions which took place years ago, and the use of the correct tense for these cases, the passato remoto, is almost disappeared (but its use is compulsory when writing). On the other hand, in southern Italy, the passato prossimo tense has been dropped, and, especially in Sicily, passato remoto is used in its stead.